The way I see it, there are four ways to explain my reaction to Celine Song’s sophomore effort, Materialists (2025): It is trying to “do something” and fails miserably. It is not trying to “do something” and fails miserably. I am a tasteless fraud so singularly out of step with the very concept of art that I should bury myself alive. It’s not for me. 3) is out for personal reasons. 4) seems possible, though, if it is “for someone,”... Read more
With thanks to J.G. Michel, host of the Parallax Views podcast, I have been taking in the films of Adam Rifkin. Rifkin strikes me as the rare journeyman-auteur hybrid. His filmography looks like a Jackson Pollack, covering everything from Charlie Sheen-narrated sororial dramas to sex-laden slashers and comedies starring wrestlers. Almost all “trash” by typical, middlebrow standards but always rich in canted angles and pitch perfect cuts. He does it all, it seems, for studios. Maybe for the money. But... Read more
If Final Destination Bloodlines (2025) can bear an explication de texte, I am not the man for it. At least not right now, not at this point in my life. I have no doubt that an interested party could speak to its brilliant uses of CGI and its subversion of tropes implied by its formal and generic shapes. In the distance, I think I even see the explication breaking through, its shell giving way to reveal more socially attuned analysis.... Read more
Late to the game as usual, I caught Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) yesterday. It’s already had a monthlong run in theaters. While internet cinephiles have tussled over the film’s effectiveness, audiences are enamored. Sinners has pulled in over three times its budget and seems poised to be among the most successful genre experiments of the last decade. Coogler may be a superhero director, but here he helps the limping film industry find its way out of a failing formula. And... Read more
Based on a popular novel of the same name, director Eli Craig’s Clown in a Cornfield (2025) promises fun. To riff on the immortal Dr. Steve Brule: you’ve got corn. You’ve got clowns. What more could a person want? Craig’s picture does indeed supply both cornfields and an army of killer clowns wielding everything from shovels and chainsaws to crossbows and hangman’s nooses. This combination should make for a rip-roaring good time. In fits and starts, it does. But I... Read more
Becoming a young cinephile in the aughts and early 2010s meant seeking out Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). Its writer, Harmony Korine, had gone on to disgust and inspire a generation raised on LiveLeak and the Pain Olympics. Rumored to be the uncut product of his young genius, Kids offered access to reality, an authenticity edited away even on scandal-obsessed daytime TV. Even then, it reeked of indie, of a world bygone, if only because I never would’ve been cool enough... Read more
Or maybe you should? It’s hard to say. At only 1.5k logs on Letterboxd, Tamra Davis’ Skipped Parts (2000) languishes in the great DVD Library of Alexandria, preserved but seldom and ill seen. Few movies have ever had the same effect on me. It’s a mummy, a statue of the Buddha from Edo Period Japan, an invitation to CBGBs printed on crumbled, thin paper. Skipped Parts is a relic of a society bygone. That’s why I must recommend it—for professional... Read more
When I saw the first Paranormal Activity (2007), I knew it wasn’t real. But, at the tender age of 13, I wanted it to be. Its elaborate pretension that, yes, this had all happened and that, yes, we have just been so lucky because the house’s cameras were turned on, helped. It gave me permission to suspend disbelief and to enjoy what amounted to a play on the found-footage film. Under a decade earlier, The Blair Witch Project (1999) did... Read more
I hesitate to say the “movies are back” because I think anyone paying sufficient attention knows cinema must change. There’s no going back to pre-COVID, pre-streaming. We can return to neither the New nor the Old Hollywood. No river stepped in at different times, etc. But I’m human, and I confess missing the mid-budget audience pleaser. Not everything needs to be Stan Brakhage or even Paul Thomas Anderson. Drop (2025) pretends to be nothing more than what it is: a... Read more
It feels bad to say, “it just didn’t connect with me.” Where there is technical brilliance, there is not always emotional connection. Sometimes this experience stems from emptiness, the so-called “exercise in style.” Not always, though. On occasion, I can watch a movie, appreciate its technical merits, marvel at the performances, respect its script, and still come away devoid of feeling. All the worse when this is a melodrama like Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (2006). As with many of Almodóvar’s films,... Read more
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